Our Time

Our Lives

Ross: Hatikvah means "the hope"

Jack: I know, but how could one have the strength to hope for anything after Bergen-Belsen? I don't think I could have maintained a frame of mind to care about life. There were those who threw themselves on the wire.

Ross: and those that survived to fight again.

Jack: I remember the line attributed to Admiral Halsey at Midway as his pilots were taking off to fight superior Japanese forces, "Where do they find such men?"

Maybe even ordinary pishers like us are capable of great things when confronted with immensities. As Boomers, we have never really been called on to protect anything more serious than our standard of living.

It is strange to have lived a life devoid of both hardship and heroism.

The Stock Market

My Seven Figure Income
I did pretty well in the market last year. I had an income in seven figures. Of course four of them were the cents, the dollar sign, and the decimal point.

And sure enough...

Eighteen years later
It has become a long time ago and it is not the least bit romantic that it has.

At Edible Complex

Here is a note I found in a notebook dated June 29, 1988, a year after Patty left
How did I get here? My life is like a singularity compressed out of time and space by my own collapse, utterly cut off from the universe by an impenetrable horizon of my own thoughtless making. I am so invisible that you could stare right at me, talk to me for an hour, and never see me. Still I am here. I glow so faintly that I can only be seen with one's eyes and reason turned aside.

I am a cliche of alienation. Literally a government clerk, a cinder of a failed marriage - burnt to a fine ash of solitude and indifference, an orphan, a former life, hoping for nothing, expecting nothing. So much has been lost and forgotten that even anger fails me. I may metamorphose at any moment.

My evenings have become so empty that I haunt coffee shops meant for student lesbians and lesbian students - the Rockridge in the summer of 1988. Just to write it so, in hopes of it sounding romantic and a long time ago, chills me with the near prospect of when it will be a long time ago.

Flash Fiction

The Divorce
I sat on my unmade bed, longing for something but not knowing quite what. I began to cry. In the evenings there was a dull ache where she used to be. I have to get out of here, I said to myself, I have to go home. Then I remembered that I was home.

Sincere Translation?

The Starry Banner
Is there a reason the Spanish version of the national anthem is called "Nuestro Himno" rather than "La Bandera Estrellada"?

In Pendency

Still Here
As so often in my life I am on hold, waiting to resolve minor matters before I can get about the serious business of my life. For me that is bicycling. I mean to ride far and wide.

But first I have to go to the pharmacy and the post office and to REI and the optometrist and the bank. I have to put asphalt on the sidewalk so passing litigants don't fall over a tripping hazard my redwood tree, Gus, has created. And on and on. But my day will come.

The Sins of the Father

In 1991, an earlier President Bush publicly promised the Shi'ite population of Iraq, that if they rebelled against Saddam Hussein, that we would support and protect them. They believed us, and their militias arose and fought the Sunni Ba'ath regime creating confusion and consternation behind Iraqi lines while they were confronting the American forces advancing into Kuwait. That rebellion was a considerable military advantage to our forces. Having liberated Kuwait, the elder Bush, allegedly at the prompting of Secretary of Defense Colin Powell, somehow forgot his promise and declined to support the Shi'ite militias with the promised airpower and heavy arms. Whereupon the Republican Guard marched almost unopposed into the momentarily Shi'ite controlled areas and massacred more than 20,000 people, substantially everyone who had relied on American promises and participated in the Shi'ite militias. With mind-boggling hypocrisy and effrontery the United States is now sponsoring the trial of Saddam Hussein for carrying out the very murders from which we had promised to protect the Shi'ites.

It is the proposition of those critical of American and British military efforts in Iraq, that we ought to withdraw our troops and abandon the Shi'ites to the mercies of the Sunnis yet again. And they propose this from a position of purportedly superior moral rectitude. Whether or not one thinks highly of George W. Bush, to the extent that he is conducting this war to rectify a monstrous wrong perpetrated by his father, he is a man struggling to do the right thing. He has more or less sacrificed his one chance at being anyone of consequence in the world, his having stumbled into the American presidency, to the task.

We owe it to the Iraqi people to make good on the promises Bush Senior made to them - safety from Sunni-Ba'ath violence and domination. If that means that Iraq will be transformed into a loose confederation like Switzerland or Canada, so be it - there are worse fates.

Starting from the beginning - again

Here I am pushing sixty, a million years old, and again starting off afresh and bewildered, like a kid leaving home for the first time, with the meaning of your parents' "Write when you get work" only slowly beginning to sink in.

I am two years retired, but only two days free of a seriously dysfunctional relationship. Everything is provisional except habit. So I will do the things I do by habit by habit, and try to focus on the things that are hard, like writing.